Do You Prefer Giving Advice or Getting Advice? Why?

Sunday, May 22nd, 2011

Do you give or get? Or do you do both?

Is there a divided line between the givers and the takers of advice giving? On what side of the line do you feel more comfortable? We all have our comfort zones and for a lot of people, giving advice is safer.

Advice giving is a daily activity and a significant way we communicate with others. We have many forms, such as the phone, email or texting to transmit our pearls of wisdom. So, what service does advice provide in our world? How much of the advice we give or receive is actually heard?

People want to make connections with others and giving advice is one way to feel connected, valued and offer help to others. Those who seek to receive advice are also looking for a connection. That’s why the activity of advice giving and receiving is a constant in most of our lives.

If you put a group of women together for more than one hour, you can be sure the flow of advice will surface quickly as there is always one person who will present an issue and then the rest of us will fall into line and provide potential solutions. Yet, there are so many different views – which is the best one for the person in need?

For most of us, when we give advice it’s from a caring intention, yet do we ask “is advice the best response to every situation? What about listening?

Have you ever gotten annoyed with someone who jumped in with advice while you were just talking it out? Has sorting through your own thoughts and other advice-giver’s thoughts only confused you rather than helped? You could still be the early stages of your thinking and you needed a listener, rather than someone to help you with her ideas. Have you jumped in too early to give advice and see that you are overwhelming your listener because she wasn’t ready yet?

It’s good to reflect on advice giving. Is it really effective? Or does it stroke our egos when we give out our pearls of wisdom? What is advice all about?

Final Thoughts

Whether you are a giver or a receiver, it’s important to stop long enough and listen, get more facts, figure out your reason for participating in the advice activity. One could brush aside these questions and state “I’m just trying to help,” yet miscommunication grows easily when we are not aware of our intentions.

This is a great topic for a women’s group meeting. We all have experienced the folly of our advice or laughed when women came up with really unusual ways to see the world.

Advice is a great tool to create more possibilities in our lives, or to share our perspective and add value to another person or to bond with the significant people in our lives.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 22nd, 2011 at 10:46 amand is filed under Personal Growth, Women. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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